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Aug 30, 2023 By Mark Redfern Photography by Lina Gaißer

Beirut (aka Zach Condon and his band) has announced a new album, Hadsel, and shared its first single, “So Many Plans.” Hadsel is due out November 10 via Condon’s own Pompeii label. Check out “So Many Plans” below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

Hadsel is the follow-up to 2019’s Gallipoli and the 2022 compilation album, Artifacts.

After cutting his Gallipoli tour short due to throat issues, in 2020 Condon traveled to Hadsel, an island off the coast of Norway, with the goal of finding a place to create where the sun barely rises. Once there he worked in a Hadselkirke, a wooden, octagonal structure that dates back to the early 1800s and features a church organ.

“During my time in Hadsel, I worked hard on the music, lost in a trance and stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager,” says Condon in a press release. “It came and rang me like a bell. I was left agonizing many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable beauty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours-long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.”

Of “So Many Plans,” Condon says: “I liked that this song struck a balance between the feelings of acceptance, hope and giving up. The lyric came from a covid-times lament that rolled effortlessly into a kind of short lullaby. The instruments were somewhat unusual for me at the time, having dusted off a baritone uke I never used before to join the album’s primary instruments of either pump or church organ and the modular synthesizer as percussion and bass.”

Read our 2007 cover story interview with Beirut.

Hadsel Tracklist:

1. Hadsel
2. Arctic Forest
3. Baion
4. So Many Plans
5. Melbu
6. Stokmarknes
7. Island Life
8. Spillhaugen
9. January 18th
10. Süddeutsches Ton-Bild-Studio
11. The Tern
12. Regulatory

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